1 online resource (424 pages) :

"What is fundamentally wrong with government today? In Against Leviathan economist and historian Robert Higgs offers a critical analysis of government power." "This book combines an economists's analytical scrutiny, an historian's respect for the facts, and a refusal to accept the standard excuses and cruelties of government officialdom. Topics include such programs as Social Security, the paternalism of the FDA and the War on Drugs, the nature of political leadership, civil liberties and the conduct of the national surveillance state, and governmental responses to a continuing stream of "crisis," including domestic economic busts and foreign wars both hot and cold."--Jacket

Articles published previously from 1981

Includes bibliographical references and index

Is more economic equality better? -- The welfare state -- Nineteen neglected consequences of income redistribution -- The mythology of Roosevelt and the New Deal -- Public choice and political leadership -- Bolingbroke, Nixon, and the rest of them -- What Professor Stiglitz learned in Washington -- Great presidents? -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration -- Regulatory harmonization -- Puritanism, paternalism, and power -- We're all sick, and government must heal us -- Lock 'em up! -- Government protects us? -- Coercion is not a societal constant -- Official economic statistics -- A tale of two labor markets -- Death and taxes -- A carnival of taxation -- Unmitigated mercantilism -- Results of a fifty-year experiment in political economy -- Results of another fifty-year experiment in political economy -- Pity the poor Japanese -- War and Leviathan in twentieth-century America -- Crisis and quasi-corporatist policymaking -- The normal constitution versus the crisis constitution -- The myth of war prosperity -- To deal with a crisis -- Beware the pork hawk -- The Cold War is over, but U.S. preparation for it continues -- Leviathan at bay? -- Escaping Leviathan? -- The era of big government is not over -- The bloody hinge of American history -- The rise of big business in America -- Origins of the corporate liberal state -- When ideological worlds collide -- On Ackerman's justification of irregular constitutional change -- The so-called third way -- Thank God for the nation state?

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